Life Among the Scorpions Page 23
We were happy that our election strategy had saved the Party (we had six members in Parliament including Nitish Kumar) and saved the country from having Lalu Yadav as prime minister. Of course, all those who attacked Lalu Yadav’s corruption daily attacked us too for giving legitimacy to the BJP, thus terming us ‘communal’. It was called ‘an ideological betrayal’. They did not understand that for people like us, political decisions and strategies were towards the far more important goal of defeating the Congress and keeping Lalu out too. However, no ideologies were compromised. They also never acknowledged that neither Party ever committed a communal act during its alliance in Bihar.
~
For many years before the 1998 general elections, I had been writing articles such as ‘Why Sonia Should Say No’ (1991) and ‘The Bahu’s Inheritance’ (1999) both in The Indian Express, about why Sonia Gandhi should not be a claimant to the high seat of politics. However, as the 1998 general elections came into view, so did she, with her children in tow. Sitaram Kesri, the Congress president, had been miserably shunted off into oblivion and she proclaimed she was now up front for the country and her family. Around the same time, television channels burst on to the scene with 24×7 news. Every Party had a spokesperson. The Congress and BJP had press conferences every afternoon where journalists took issues from one party to another. The Samata Party was prominent as it was headed by George Fernandes who had stitched the NDA together, assuring a thoroughly possible outcome of a Congress defeat. However, being in a coalition with the BJP meant fighting a smaller number of seats. But the Bihar leaders of the Samata Party had not moved with the times. None realized that television now gave Party views and people huge visibility and carried the Party message far beyond the crowds at public meetings. Every candidate was only interested in the particular constituency and the state, and not television bytes. Television was an indulgence they felt was unimportant. As a result, off they all went to Bihar leaving me looking behind my shoulder to see who our spokesperson was supposed to be. Nobody cared and nobody designated me as one either. Seeing the media descend every day to hear what we had to say vis-à-vis the Congress, I faced the cameras and fixed our press meet time half an hour before the others so that we laid out the agenda for the day. I questioned dynastic issues concerning Sonia Gandhi and also raised doubts over her competence. I defended Om Prakash Chautala when the Election Commission prevented him from voting as chief minister by banning him from entering the state on polling day. I fielded queries about the tiresome communal/secular debate and whatever else came up of relevance on a particular day. Soon, I came to be seen as an effective spokesperson of the Samata Party, apart from being its general secretary, yet officially remained un-designated by its leadership till the very end.
In the Party, nobody watched television as they were in the field in Bihar, and nobody cared even though the rest of the country noticed. I too had not realized that I had achieved a wide national presence just by speaking into a microphone, participating in television debates and, of course handling all press conferences and the affairs at the Party office. This was when I often sat with Narendra Modi, who was then General Secretary of the BJP, to discuss election trends and results at television studios. We were fairly well-coordinated in our responses although we never had any prior consultations. He was generally quiet and serious, and very respectful when I joined a panel to give our comments. He was not given to small talk which was a pleasant change from useless banter that many men adopt with women in television studios. We were in tandem as alliance partners so there were obviously no differences of opinion.
~
Certain states fade from people’s minds, unless they are politically important for a short while. They are in news with regard to issues like elections, violent agitations or when ruling governments are toppled through overnight defections. We don’t realize how much we alienate them in this callous process. Manipur comes into this category. The Samata Party had become fairly prominent in Manipur thanks to decades of interest shown by its socialist leaders. George Fernandes was a particular favourite among people there as he travelled in these parts often and Dr Lohia had always raised the importance of paying attention to India’s Northeast—borders, its people and their aspirations, I too went to Manipur often, and spent many hours with the feisty Meira Paibi who carried flaming torches at night to keep drunks, drug users and violent groups away from their villages; I would often also visit the over four hundred-year-old all-women’s Ima market where they sold vegetables and local handlooms. I have attended weddings and funerals, addressed Party meetings and election rallies in far-off places like Moreh, Churachandpur and even Longpi in the Ukhrul district where women practise a unique technique of walking around the potter’s wheel to turn the black-coloured pot instead of rotating the wheel.
During the Assembly elections of 2001, when James Lyngdoh from Meghalaya was in the Election Commission, militancy had risen to new heights. There were at least twenty-seven ethnic outfits dominating some area or the other. Our Party president, Radhabinod Koijam, forwarded me four letters he had received typed on formal letterheads from four different militant bodies, duly signed, demanding a down payment of twenty and thirty lakh rupees for them to leave our candidates alone to campaign during an election. I led a delegation to the Election Commission.
‘Mr Lyngdoh, sir, you are the body that has to ensure free and fair elections. Please take strict action against those making these threats and demands,’ I said, presuming he would respond on the basis of this first hand evidence.
‘Oh! Is Manipur a part of India?’ he said with his eyebrows raised and a half-smile on his face. I could understand the pain behind what he said. I am sure he acted on this complaint behind the scenes to the best of his ability, but nothing changed.
~
In the middle of all this I was made Party president in January 2000. I had no illusions. It was a cynical decision taken just to solve a technical problem created by the Election Commission. The Party leaders had fought on the common Janata Dal symbol so the Commission decreed that anyone fighting on one symbol could not be an office bearer of another Party. So George Sahib had to step down as president. I was a convenient stop gap recommended by Bashist Narain Singh, MP from Bihar, and the decision was unanimously approved by everyone else. As usual, George Sahib sat silently throughout. My mother was at that time on her death bed when I was called at 2 am for an emergency meeting where this decision was taken. A couple of days later, I was called from the hospital again in the middle of the afternoon to be part of a press conference with BJP chief L.K. Advani and JD(U) chief Sharad Yadav to announce that the three parties had come to a seat sharing arrangement. My mother was fading fast, but I had to leave her.
As the press conference got over, the hospital telephoned to inform me that my mother had passed away. It was a most bizarre and ironic experience receiving congratulations and condolences at the very same time in the week that followed. I needed personal time to process my feelings on the loss of a parent, which was quite different from my father’s untimely death when I was thirteen. I had to be at home meeting those who came to condole, like Farooq Abdullah, sundry friends, Tibetans with prayer scarves, domestic workers and others from the poorer sections of society whom my mother was always helping. Kashmiri carpet vendors who were our neighbours laid out all their new carpets on the floor during the small memorial meeting at home. Then, I had to put on another hat and face and go to the Party office and George Fernandes’s home to meet hundreds of Party workers and favour-seekers. Sadly, Nitish Kumar who was always particular that people visit or enquire when his relatives were in hospital, did not find a moment to condole or even speak about my mother’s demise to me later. Sharad Yadav apologized for missing the condolence meeting. Digvijay Singh, a minister from our Party, and George Fernandes, helped me with some formalities. I had to borrow money to put a notice of her demise in the newspapers. My former husband (Ashok and I had separated by then) was i
ll in Jammu and my son was travelling in Europe on his way back to India from the UK; thus Aditi and I had to manage everything on our own. There was hardly any time to grieve or mourn and one could not celebrate the so-called honour of being made president of my Party.
~
As Party president, I had tried to have a decisive say in the allotment of tickets at our meetings of the Parliamentary Board. Most often the men would speak so loudly they drowned out my voice, ignoring the fact that I had already started speaking. It was annoying and frustrating. I have read later that this attribute of overriding others’ voices is a common characteristic among men and a part of a subconscious power play on their part. In such serious meetings I was regularly asked whether I would serve tea to them or someone would comment on how nice I looked. This was not a request or comment they would direct to a male counterpart. Whenever a good woman-aspirant’s name for a ticket would come up I would support her vociferously to be told no by other members there, saying it would be a losing seat. I would insist that a woman had to be given the opportunity to contest even if she was going to lose the same way a man would lose a seat that was impossible to win. I once had to fight to send extra funds to a woman candidate in Bihar whose election was delayed by a week because of floods. No one wanted her to have the funds required to cover the costs of those extra days.
Our general secretary, Shambhu Sharan Srivastava, and I worked together to bring out a monthly newsletter in Hindi and English on behalf of the Party at the cost of two rupees each. It contained news of Party activities across the country and issues of importance like resolutions taken at the Population Council of India and political matters relevant at the time. I requested Party presidents of each state to pay. The most anyone had to pay was four hundred rupees for two hundred copies. Yet, Raghunath Jha, then Party president in Bihar, who later fought with Nitish Kumar and left to join Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and most others, never did. I never found out if anyone read them. Only Betty D’Souza, MP and always a good friend at my side, and the Party presidents of Lakshadweep and Andhra Pradesh bothered to do so. I realized that the days of writing, reading and Party publications were coming to an end as far as the politicians of our Party were concerned. I really was the odd one out, not counting George Fernandes who never stopped engaging with the written word.
I knew George Fernandes was on my side in all these efforts but he would keep silent and let me fight my own battles. He was a cruel but excellent teacher who loved throwing me among the scorpions even when he felt sad when I lost.
~
When the NDA lost the elections in 2004, the media and politicians from opposing parties cited their own reasons according to whatever suited them. For some, it was the over-exaggerated India Shining campaign, while for others it was the Tehelka exposé (which was disproved when Mamata Banerjee walked out of the NDA on this issue but lost the West Bengal Assembly elections the very next month). Some said it was the ‘genocide’ of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Placed at the heart of things, I believed it was not really any of the above. Being out of the election fray, I had a different vantage point. I was getting dismayed at seeing the arrogance of the BJP growing at the cost of its allies. It was also a mistake to have the elections before time without having consulted the allies. It had an alliance with our Samata Party in Bihar but did not continue with it in Jharkhand. It dropped Om Prakash Chautala in Haryana at the last moment and hitched on to Bansi Lal. It wanted to shed the alliance with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and tried to leave the unpleasant task to George Fernandes who thought the DMK was keen to continue it but was not being placated. The BJP began to announce it would win a majority on its own. I was disappointed, as in contrast I could see the Congress stitching up alliances. I wrote a note to Sudheendra Kulkarni at the PMO laying all this out. Of course, my comments were too insignificant for anyone to notice or be responded to although many of our Party workers in the field agreed with me and gave me daily feedback to reinforce my views.
By the time the 2009 elections came around, I had quit the JD(U) which had swallowed up the Samata Party, much against my wishes. I believed we had initiated the battle in Bihar against Lalu Yadav. The JD(U) was a latecomer, having been with Lalu Yadav till then. I also knew we were the larger and better-organized Party. We had put in a lot of effort to create the Samata Party, its symbol and its strong presence in the public eye. Suddenly, it was all getting washed away. We also felt uneasy that Nitish Kumar was happy to sacrifice the name and personality of the Party built by him and George Fernandes from scratch to embrace his old caste-ally Sharad Yadav. This, despite the fact that Yadav had not contributed much to national politics for years and had at that time no presence in Bihar. I assumed that Nitish probably felt comfortable having a Party colleague he could dominate and manipulate according to his wishes.
In 2003, I decided that neither I nor the newly merged Party needed each other anymore. I was left alone facing the Tehelka fallout—from Enquiry Commissions to the vindictiveness of UPA’s ‘caged parrot’, to the CBI foisting FIRs, charge sheets and court hearings on me. Meanwhile, I remained devoted to my vast number of craftspersons and their needs and I derived a lot of strength working with them. Sometimes I would bury myself in guiding the choice of colours an artisan could use in a work just to escape the ugliness around me. In the 2009 general elections, I was compelled to be involved in handling an ailing George Fernandes’s solitary, ill-advised and quixotic fight-cum-horror story in Muzaffarpur. It was my last experience at election involvement. By then, I had learned everything there was to know about the face and underbelly of electoral politics in India.
*Sampa Das was formerly Samata Party president in West Bengal.
*Murdabad translates to ‘death to or upon’
*Spanning over the 1980s and 1990s, and coming to the fore during the time V.P. Singh was defence minister, the Bofors (Bofors being the Swedish arms manufacturer) scandal involved Indian National Congress politicians, and officials from Indian and Swedish governments receiving kickbacks or illegal payoffs from an arms deal in Sweden. This also saw the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi being implicated in a major way at the time.
*On 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid, a sixth-century mosque, was destroyed by hundreds of kar sevaks in Ayodhya. They did so upon the claim that the mosque had been built on land that was considered to be Lord Rama’s birthplace. Soon after the demolition, disastrous Hindu-Muslim riots across the country ensued in which thousands died. (See http://indianexpress.com/article/india/babri-masjid-demolition-timeline-ayodhya-ram-mandir-advani-uma-bharti-mm-joshi-supreme-court-4619160/)
15
NATIONAL POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY
Instincts in Action
I WISH THE TITLE OF THIS chapter could have been a little longer, for instance, ‘How I prevented a diplomatic embarrassment in China’ or something on those lines—the way American books sometimes are titled. There’s the famous How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and one titled I’d Tell You that I Love You, but then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter. When I was searching for examples of long titles, I came across two that could have been good inspirations for the title of this book: Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed written by an ordained pastor named Lance Carbuncle, but maybe I would have sounded too defeated—which I am not. Another title I would have loved to appropriate was The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente, but maybe making it The Lady Who Circumnavigated the Land of Politics and Found Herself in a Soup of Her Own Making. Anyway, I will stop musing.
The Samata Party was crucial to the formation of the first NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998. (Vajpayee’s earlier stint in 1996 had lasted only thirteen days because only the Akali Dal was prepared to join the government.) Perhaps not realizing what Indian politics was all about, Sonia Gandhi had clearly over-committed with her statement outside Rashtrapati Bhavan
stating that the Congress had 272 members supporting them with ‘more coming’. When George Fernandes and I had gone to visit I.K. Gujral in 2008 to invite him to a big event in Bangalore, we had a heart-to-heart chat over tea. He told us that Sonia Gandhi had visited him at that time and naively blurted out, ‘I want to become the prime minister. How do I do it?’ Gujral told us he was highly amused and gently explained to her that things didn’t happen that way and that she had to approach the matter in a completely different manner. In his autobiography Matters of Discretion (2011), he speaks of the same occasion and reveals that he told her that she should not trust Harkishen Singh Surjeet of the CPM who was ultimately keen on backing Jyoti Basu.*
This little titbit was never known nor spoken of publicly, and subsequently her ‘sacrifice’ and ‘renunciation’ of the prime ministerial post in 2004 were extolled across the world. This enabled people to forget the ambitiousness of the hasty ‘272’ claim.
I contributed in a small way in Congress’s not being able to make 272. Jyoti Basu, despite being a willing candidate from the opposition side, faced opposition from within his own party, while Sonia Gandhi was in a determined mood to head the government with everyone else tagging on from wherever they could be brought in. Mulayam Singh was holding out. His Party meeting to decide on this issue was scheduled for the next morning around 8 am. The previous evening, there was a dinner function at Samata Party’s leader, Digvijay Singh’s residence. On this hot April night, Chandra Shekhar and George Fernandes were also present. I was on tenterhooks about the Congress numbers and found myself far away from a partying mood. I was annoyed that our senior leaders were not being proactive about preventing what I saw as an impending disaster for the entire nation and casually socializing instead. I grumbled in George Fernandes’s ear that they had no business to be standing at a dinner party instead of attempting to ensure Mulayam Singh did not support the Congress. I asked him and Chandra Shekhar why they could not put some pressure on Mulayam Singh at this crucial time. They huddled in a corner for a while, and it was decided that Chandra Shekhar would telephone Mulayam Singh the same night. We all went our different ways, but I was so worried that I reached 3, Krishna Menon Marg at 7 am the next morning to find out what had happened in the night. Apparently, Mulayam Singh had gone underground and was not reachable even to Chandra Shekhar. It seemed ominous. George Fernandes phoned Mohan Singh, a loyal friend and by then a senior member of the Samajwadi Party. He was going into the meeting and promised to call back with the news as soon as a decision was taken. He strongly shared our views on the subject and promised to express them forcefully at their meeting. I was on edge. Around forty-five minutes later, he telephoned to give us the crucial news: they had decided not to support the Congress. Apparently, Mulayam had made himself unavailable in order to avoid calls from Harkishen Singh Surjeet that had come all night. I was relieved, not realizing that Sonia Gandhi would eventually be the ultimate power center in the upcoming UPA era.